DebianInstallGuide

Unofficial Installation Guide

This is an unofficial installation guide. It may be outdated or apply only to very specific configurations and versions. The official and maintained installation steps for RT are in the README and UPGRADING documents included in the official .tar.gz packages.

Install request-tracker3.6 rt3.6-apache2, postgresql-8.1, libapache2-mod-fastcgi and libcgi-fast-perl with aptitude. This dragged in some apache1 stuff for me, so I had to manually change some selections in the aptitude GUI before the selections were sensible.

Read notes in /usr/share/doc/request-tracker3.6/NOTES.Debian.gz, but skip out when it starts with database setup. Do the following instead:

In RT_SiteConfig.pm add the following lines to the database setup section:

Set($DatabaseHost , '');
Set($DatabaseRTHost , '');

This makes database communication go over the local socket instead of tcp over the loopback network interface, which also makes same-host ident identification

Edit /etc/postgresql/8.1/main/pg_hba.conf and add the following two lines:

Now you can go back to follow the instructions in NOTES.Debian again. An easy way to get the apache config included is to do ln -s /etc/request-tracker3.6/apache2-something.conf /etc/apache2/conf.d/, or it can be included in a file in /etc/apache2/sites-available.

Make sure you have a working apache2 install before you go on to installing request tracker and read FastCGIConfiguration for hints on how to do your FastCGI setup.

The rt3 packages are part of the standard debian packages with (almost) all dependencies described. You can use:

apt-get install request-tracker3

or

apt-get install request-tracker3.4

or

apt-get install request-tracker3.6

The database system to be used (postgres or mysql) is not made into a dependency. You need to make sure that the database you want to use is installed. This makes one more /apt-get install/ .

apt-get install postgresql postgresql-client

or

apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client

The default database in the configuration files is postgresql. (Is this true? My RT 3.6.3 distribution defaults to MySQL). I have changed this to mysqld because I used that for my RT2 installation before, and because I had some strange problems with RT3.0.9 and rt2-to-rt3-1.23. You may be more successful, so by all means if you prefer postgresql, try it before following me in this step.

If you use PostgreSQL (and on the localhost), then in addition to following the instructions in /usr/share/doc/request-tracker3.4/INSTALL.Debian.gz you will need to add the following to your RT_SiteConfig.pm:

Set($DatabaseHost , '');
Set($DatabaseRTHost , '');

Note: If you want to customize your RT3 install, the Debian path is /usr/local/share/request-tracker3 instead.

You may also need to install the rt3-clients package (apt-get install rt3-clients) if you want to enable the mail processing, and configure your mailer the right way, so, for instance, for exim, see EximConfig.

User comment: if using mod-fastcgi in default install mason_handler.fcgi won't start - RT_SiteConfig.pm is owned by root with mode 600 so won't be loaded unless you run your web server as root or fix permissions (apache runs as www-data:www-data unless changed):

Note that the versions of the perl and mysql packages in woody are deprecated by RT. However, you may find that RT still functions just fine. If anyone finds anything broken, please add it to this page...